


leave your armor on

by remnantof



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Cheating, F/M, M/M, Multi, Multiple Pairings, Sexual Content, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-13
Updated: 2011-07-13
Packaged: 2017-10-21 08:51:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim is bad at relationships (ultimately Tim/Jaime).</p>
            </blockquote>





	leave your armor on

**Author's Note:**

> reposted from tumblr by the author

He’d never kissed Kon, that’s not what this is about—but when he kisses Cassie hard enough, slow enough, just—just a little clumsy, he can find out how Kon kissed. He can feel him in the way Cassie’s hands tighten a little too hard, more strength than a girl her age should have, bruising him through his armor. It makes him feel hot and heavy inside, makes him want to move and pant and keep moving, breathe damp into the hair that sticks to the back of her neck.

When she holds on it’s too tight and not tight enough, not quite the embrace Kon used to force him into, squeeze until he couldn’t breathe and he didn’t really want to. H-harder, he wheezes, and she narrows her eyes but does it, a little more, a little more, until he thinks his back could break. Until he’ll feel it for days, long after all thoughts and memories of the sex have faded.

That’s not what this is about.

She narrows her eyes and he wants to see red, wants her to break his back and burn a hole in his chest.

-

“This isn’t even about us,” is what she says at the end. When he’s trying to—they’re at dinner, they’re on a date. He doesn’t really understand the ritual any better than he did the last time he went, but they’re. They’re friends, and he’d like to have dinner with her.

 _Are_ they still friends? When he wants to tell her that Kon will die if they don’t remember him, but he doesn’t want to hear how he’s already dead. How he’s been dead this whole time, and the whole point, Tim, is letting that be real—

“You started it,” he says instead, and she looks like he slapped her, making him look down at the table, ashamed. When he glances up she’s angry, then—something else. Like she’s realized she’s getting angry with a child. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have—we shouldn’t have done this. I’m sorry I started it, and now I’m ending it.”

She leaves; the food arrives. He picks at the food on his plate before asking for the check, brings her order to the Tower in a styrofoam box and leaves it at her door. It’s not a peace offering: he just wanted to treat her to something, and looking down at the box, in its plastic bag, he has to admit he didn’t know what else to do.

-

He doesn’t know what he’s doing with Jaime either. It’s not about sex: isn’t about anything, really—the thrill of pushing him down, how easy it is. Of being irresponsible, of having nothing to lose. Nothing about Jaime hurts right now, nothing he does makes Tim think of someone else, dragging his teeth down a lean, masculine torso and feeling it vibrate a little when the scarab talks.

He wonders what it’s saying, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt either, it’s nothing to do with him until Jaime’s hands are in his hair, clutching and spasming with indecision. “My family’s home,” he whispers, breathless and conflicted, because Tim is unzipping his jeans with his teeth and at the end of the day, Jaime is just a teenage boy.

Or, they both are, right?

“Good,” Tim says, licking the edges of his smile until Jaime shudders and lets his head fall back against the floor. They’ll go downstairs when he’s finished and he’ll watch it play out on Jaime’s face: he’ll remember when he had a family, when he kept secrets.

-

There aren’t any secrets with her, though. Only the ones she’s keeping, and he doesn’t think there are many. She knows when he kisses her that it’s the way Steph used to kiss him, the way she used to lick into his mouth like she wasn’t—not like she was invading it, not like she was taking something, but like she just wanted to. Like it was an option she was telling him about, and it’s an option Cass likes, framing his face with her gauntlets and sucking on his tongue.

Steph would do that too, and the texture of the gloves isn’t the same but it’s rough, and that’s enough. He won’t ask her to wear the Spoiler suit, even if she knows what this is about. She never went this far with Steph either, but they remember her for it anyway, the way their bodies fit and push and pull, try to consume each other. Like he can keep every sound he fucks out of her, muffled through the cowl, or hissed through her teeth, and pretend they’re Steph’s. Like she can read the way he moves and pretend he moved this way for Steph.

Like they can reach into each other and stitch all their memories, all the pieces they’ve been left with, into something like the person they miss.

He could clone her, he thinks. They could tell her enough—surely _Cass_ could tell her enough, and she would be for Cass, and being the person who gave that to her—that would be for him. She could be close _enough_ —

but there are no secrets and she squeezes his head with her thighs, asks why he stopped but knows, squeezes a little harder and says _no_. No, nothing would be close enough for Cass. Nothing should be close enough for him, but.

This is.

-

“Tim, what are we doing?”

It isn’t about anything until—until it’s dark and he’s not leaving, he’s still in Jaime’s bed and Jaime’s hands are in his hair. Until Jaime’s asking what it’s about, and Tim doesn’t have an answer. It feels like fucking up but also like getting it right for the first time.

There’s no name coming up out of the ground, no ghosts in Jaime’s bedroom. Tim’s finally gone too far away from it all. Who could Jaime possibly make him miss?

He didn’t know Ted Kord that well. He—

it’s possible Jaime and Tim’s paths never would have crossed without that loss and—

Jaime’s stroking his hair like he doesn’t know what else to do while Tim thinks all of these things, and his lips move in the dark, he says something: he takes back the question. He’s so sweet, so—normal. Not like someone Tim’s lost, but like someone he could lose. He knows this Blue Beetle a lot, a _lot_ better than the last two.

Jaime knows him a lot better than the last two—three—Robins, Tim thinks. “Something stupid,” he finally answers, rolling onto Jaime to bite his way into his mouth anyway.

-

He doesn’t go to Jason often, because neither of them is close enough to what the other wants. The failed Robins, one with a scar running over his scalp and one with a stick up his ass: neither knows how to laugh anymore. How to be bright, how to bring light to a dark place.

They meet in them anyway, figures made of dull leather and nomex shines and a tuft of white hair. When Tim pulls on it with his teeth, Jason almost shuts down, and he likes knowing that more than he likes trying it. He wants Robin, he wants the boy in the case, telling him what he already knows, what he’s afraid to know, afraid to hear.

He gets Red Hood: it’s about the same, things he doesn’t like coming out of Jason’s mouth until he has to kiss him to shut him up. Fuck his face on Jason’s cock to shut them both up.

-

“Jason stop,” he says, when he’s done enjoying the feel of Jason’s teeth on his throat, trying to bruise him through the cowl. His hands slide up Jason’s body to push him away, but Jason isn’t that person, not really: he takes the step back on his own. “What’s the matter baby bro, the family resemblance finally start to creep you out?”

Tim frowns, but suspects he was going to do that anyway, still uncertain when he says, “I think I have a boyfriend.”

It shouldn’t be weird to tell Jason, who is very male, and who he has very non heterosexual sex with on a semiregular basis— _had_ —but. But a little charge starts in his stomach all the same, having said it to anyone. Having _said it_. Jason’s lip is curled back and his eyes are narrowed, no— _rolling_ —

“Jesus, well good of you to quit fucking me before you’re _sure_ about that one.”

Then: “You’re really an asshole, aren’t you?”

Tim smiles this time, leaning against another cold wall in Gotham with his cowl up, his lenses down, having some kind of—a fucking _tryst_ with his undead adoptive brother. Or not having it, this time, not kissing Jason or pulling his pants open to stop what he doesn’t want to hear coming from that mouth. He needs to hear it. “Yeah,” he breathes, trying not to laugh: “I really am.”

-

The second time with Jaime is different. His friends are alive again and they’re not at Jaime’s house, no parents, no protests. Jaime’s relaxed and trying to get Tim to follow, kissing him just above the collar of his shirt and rubbing his back with dry hands, pushed up underneath it. It makes him feel shaky inside, but he can’t say why, can’t let it turn into shaking on the outside.

Why is he doing this? Should he tell Jaime about Jason, about Cass and Cassie, Steph and Kon? Should he tell him that he’s outlived the last Robin by two years, that—

that he’s an _asshole_?

Jaime should make an informed decision, right? Tim’s not sure what kind of decision he’s made, if he even made one.

Cassie ate the food he left and next time he cried, she just hugged him, and they remembered Kon another way.

Cass is in Hong Kong. He doesn’t know if that’s what home is for her now, but she’s there.

Jason _really_ likes to talk about explosives.

Steph and Kon aren’t really dead, and, well. Jason.

The point is: none of it adds up in his head. Did he fail or not, is he failing now? Could it really ever be failing, with Jaime’s hands hot against his skin, his wrists dragging Tim’s shirt up? The scarab humming hard enough to hide Jaime’s heartbeat when Tim finally moves, sliding and pressing them together, rolling their hips together through their jeans. “Tim,” Jaime says, only it’s a question, not the warm slip-sigh of his name that he could really, really get used to. He hums, moving against him anyway, starting to pant against his throat. “Do you, um—do you want to get dinner after this?”

 _This_ : the roll of their hips, the red creases of denim dug into their skin and the space between their bodies going humid with breath and sweat and heat. The way they fumble with their clothes, fumble trying to learn each other’s bodies, fumble to keep Tim from going deeper and deeper into his head, until he doesn’t know what he’s doing, who he’s doing it for.

He pushes down with his hips and doesn’t answer until Jaime’s panting too, maybe a little pissed at being ignored, but distracted from it. Tim’s next breath is a laugh: “Sure,” he says, sitting back on his heels to open Jaime’s pants and tease them down, “I know a nice place around here: I’ll loan you a shirt.”

Jaime asks what’s wrong with the one he’s wearing until Tim starts ripping it open at the collar, then he’s just glassy-eyed and swallowing, and that—that’s all Jaime.

It’s all them.


End file.
